


if you call for me (you know i'll run)

by mapped



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Campaign 01 Season 02: Fantasy High Sophomore Year (Dimension 20), Character Study, First Kiss, Getting Together, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:29:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22902475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: As Fabian remakes himself, Riz falls more deeply in love.[Set during Sophomore Year e06 - Pirate Brawl and e11 - Revelations & Revivifications.]
Relationships: Riz Gukgak/Fabian Aramais Seacaster
Comments: 29
Kudos: 198





	if you call for me (you know i'll run)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [potter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/potter/gifts).



> Title from Lana Del Rey - 'Old Money'. 
> 
> For my darling Tilly, who made me watch Fantasy High in the first place, and who gave me this prompt:
>
>> the first time riz ever thought something was beautiful was when he saw fabian seacaster pull himself out of the ocean and fall broken to the deck of the leviathan

Nightmare King or no Nightmare King, Riz will never not dream of Fabian dangling headfirst from ropes twisted around his feet, blood running up his face, red streaks through the silver of his hair.

Riz has spent too much time with Kristen; the terror this sight provokes in him is nearly a devout dread, something that makes his knees want to bend, though he has no faith in any god. He stays upright, barely. Hands too afraid to reach. Distantly he thinks he understands how reverence and fear can be the same. If not for the frilly pink bloomers wrapped around Fabian’s legs—some poor pirate’s laundry he must have picked up on the way down—this scene could be right at home amid religious iconography. The hallowed picture of some cold, untouchable saint.

Fabian’s one eye opening is a relief Riz doesn’t have the tools to measure. He cuts Fabian down, and even though Fabian is alive, breathing, and answering his friends’ questions in a colorless voice, Riz doesn’t stop blaming himself. He should’ve noticed Fabian slipping away earlier. What good is he, if he can’t even keep an eye on his best friend? He’s supposed to be the person who picks up on things other people don’t. That’s all he’s for. What use does he have now?

In the van on the way back, Riz sees the Hangman leaning its warm, rumbling body against Fabian’s side. He sees this, curled moodily in the seat behind Fabian, and he thinks: even that he cannot do. A motorcycle can do that, can offer the simple comfort of touch, and he can’t.

He goes with Fabian into Fabian’s room at the Gold Gardens, because that at least he can do. He doesn’t expect sleep to hit Fabian so quickly, but it does, and he sits at the end of the bed and watches Fabian’s body—something he could never before have thought of as frail, but now seems liable to blow away in the slightest draft—tossing underneath the sheets as though he’s still falling, eternally, with no one to catch him.

Riz doesn’t expect sleep to hit himself so quickly, either.

And when he wakes up Fabian is gone again. Again, always, forever. Riz sees the Sword of Seacaster plunged through the engine of the Hangman and wishes for a moment that it was his own neck, for all the failures that have stained his hands tonight, black and slick as the oil pooling on the floor.

He breaks his arm falling out of the window to try and find Fabian, his body paralyzed and Kalina taunting him. He wants only for Fabian to be safe. Wants so desperately he can’t think. Can’t keep the wrong words from tumbling out of his mouth and endangering another friend.

Then, in the van again: Cathilda brings Fabian in, the ocean shimmering on his skin. He’s shivering in his translucent shirt, his scarred eye exposed, Owlbears jacket nowhere to be seen. And Ragh’s mom might be dead, but all Riz can think is _thank god_. Any god, every god. Tracker’s moon and Kristen’s doubt. All of it.

He can say nothing; he just studies Fabian quietly. Fabian’s hair is now wet not with rivulets of blood but just pure sea. After days of sailing and being on the Leviathan, Riz thought he had gotten used to the smell of salt on the air, but Fabian smells so strongly and darkly of it, it almost reminds Riz of black coffee, all the half-drunk cups of it littered around his office when he’s up late trying to crack a case. Scents that make him feel alive in the same way.

Fabian alive. Fabian feverish and fatigued, but alive. He doesn’t in this moment look anything like his father. Not a pirate at all, but something risen from the depths of the sea, shaped from seawater itself. Something divine.

Riz would follow him anywhere. Like Kristen, he could start a new church of one.

* * *

Riz watches as Fabian dances with the elven sheet, whirling it around the last fire elemental. He can barely tear his eyes away for long enough to aim his arquebus. Fabian’s always been one for flourishes, performing unnecessary flips any chance he gets in battle, and it makes so much sense that he would be a _dancer_ , but the possibility had never occurred to Riz before.

The fire elemental burns Fabian and Fabian holds on. Heart pounding, furious that he has to look away for even a second, Riz shoots at the statue. The pitcher it’s holding topples forward, water rushing forth, causing a flare of light and colors. Fabian has the fire elemental encircled in his arms and Riz feels a kind of delirium. White silken sheet rippling in the air. The fire elemental kisses Fabian and Riz has to pat his own shoulders to make sure he’s not still on fire.

He’s not. Fabian was the one who quenched it before, with that sheet, but Riz feels in need of further quenching, somehow.

They make their way back to the meeting point. Fabian talks about the fire touching his lips, slipping down his throat, lingering in his belly. Riz thinks he can feel that same ember glowing inside himself, golden and hot. He doesn’t tell anyone. What he does do is shout “Spring break! I believe in you!” at both Fabian and Gorgug as they too shout it at him, a wild joy pouring over all of them.

Fabian dances all night in Kei Lumennura, and all night Riz watches. Moonlight kisses Fabian’s skin the same way the fire elemental kissed his mouth. He dances with an energy that Riz was afraid he’d lost, springing across the grass, delighted with himself.

Riz remembers then the Fabian he’d thought was made of seawater.

Something so fluid could never break. Riz understands now that this is what he sees in Fabian: not only the fighter’s strength in him, but the dancer’s grace. The fluidity of an ocean that ebbs and flows, and is so many things at once.

In the morning, Riz joins Fabian. He doesn’t know how to dance, but watching Fabian makes him _need_ to move, to leap across the clearing with flailing limbs. Fig strums her guitar. Even without any spellwork, the music feels magical. Exhilaration floods him and he prances stupidly, happily.

At some point, Fabian drapes the sheet around Riz and tugs him behind a tree, laughing. It’s the kind of bright laughter that could dispel any nightmare, and it’s been too long since Riz last heard it; he tucks the memory of it safe into a pocket of his mind to guard against future darkness.

“The Ball!” Fabian exclaims. “You call this dancing?”

Riz shrugs, bouncing up and down on the spot. “I think I’m pretty fantastic.”

Fabian shakes his head. “I suppose very few are gifted with such talent as I am.” He strikes a pose and twirls the sheet fancily.

 _You’re beautiful,_ Riz thinks, and half-chokes on the thought. He realizes how tired he is: he’s hardly been able to sleep since the night of neverending disaster on the Leviathan. In fact, he’s probably not slept properly since before their adventure began. He’s scared of mirrors and he’s scared of himself. But when he looks at Fabian now, he isn’t scared.

Yes, he’s been avoiding examining his feelings about Fabian directly. If he’s honest with himself, he knew a long time ago that there was something there that required examining. But now there’s no need to look at it through a magnifying glass. What he feels for Fabian is vast, like the pirate city of Leviathan floating on the water. Buoyant and bustling. Loud as anything.

And he isn’t scared. He knows what Fabian can do; what Fabian can be. Fabian fell from the Crow’s Keep, tangled in ropes and bloomers and half-dead. Fabian fell into the ocean and emerged with only despair and pneumonia, discarding everything he thought defined him. And Fabian is standing in front of him now, waving a soft elven sheet around and grinning. Half-elf, and a dancer, and whole once more.

He isn’t scared because when he looks at Fabian he knows that he can wake up from any nightmare.

He came so close to losing Fabian more than once. But if Fabian can climb from way down deep in the abyss back up to the top of the mountain, Riz can definitely meet him up there.

So he says, out loud, “You’re beautiful.”

Fabian’s eye widens and Riz is pleased. He likes surprising Fabian. Unfortunately, he also doesn’t know when to stop talking.

“It really looks like that fire elemental, uh, fired you up when he kissed you, huh. When you dance it’s just so—free!” His voice squeaks and he gesticulates frantically. “I’m just so glad to see you like this, because I don’t know how I’m ever going to stop thinking about that night on the Leviathan and what I could have done differently and why I couldn’t have just _noticed_ things, that’s my _job_ , I’m _literally_ a licenced PI now, right! And you’re my best friend and I was so worried but even your _bike_ could sort of hug you and I couldn’t, I couldn’t do anything, I was just there, useless—”

“Hey, Riz.” Fabian cloaks Riz’s head with the sheet. “Shut up. Don’t talk about my dead bike, it’s still a sore subject, I killed him.”

Riz makes to speak, but Fabian hushes him again.

“Why couldn’t you hug me?” Fabian asks gently, his thumb brushing back a lock of hair from Riz’s forehead.

“Because I wanted more than anything to touch you,” Riz says, his voice sounding thin. 

Fabian scoffs. “That doesn’t make any sense, the Ball.”

“It does. I wanted to touch you more than it seemed like I should want to touch you, so I couldn’t let myself.” Riz feels it right now, down to his fingertips, that blazing want, like the thrill of sneaking, the urgent need not to get caught.

“I bet it’s not as much as I want you to touch me right now.”

“Okay.” Riz reaches up to take both of Fabian’s hands in his own. The warmth of each hand already like a fire elemental’s kiss against each of Riz’s palms. Boldly, he steps forward and rests his head on Fabian’s chest. It’s solid—not seawater but flesh and bone, and a heart hammering fiercely within, echoing Riz’s own. “Is this good?”

“Almost perfect,” Fabian says, and when Riz looks up at him, he leans down. Their lips press together and it’s so much, so absurdly tender and wonderful that the phrase “Roëmænce Partnær” can’t help but slide into Riz’s brain, which makes him shudder and then laugh against Fabian’s mouth, helplessly. He breaks the kiss, throwing his arms around Fabian’s waist and burrowing his head into Fabian’s shirt as much as possible.

“Is something wrong?” Fabian asks, clearly concerned. “I thought that was going rather splendidly.”

Riz grunts. “I just remembered Baron from the Baronies appearing in that mirror and telling me she was my Roëmænce Partnær.”

“ _I’m_ your Roëmænce Partnær now, the Ball.”

“Horrifying.”

Fabian does an impressive shimmy while singing “Roëmænce Partnær” and attempts to coax Riz into joining in; Riz is tempted to reconsider his life choices. But Fabian really can’t be worse than Baron from the Baronies, and when Riz looks at him, he is breathless again with how beautiful Fabian is—how he has let the past few days change him and soften him, and how he yields to hope.

“Don’t say that you’re useless, all right?” Fabian says, gripping Riz’s shoulders. “I couldn’t have recovered from my dire state of abject misery without your unwavering support. I’m only going to say this once: you’re my best friend _and_ my Roëmænce Partnær. I believe in you.”

He kisses Riz again, and it feels like a fall and a dance and an ignition, all at once; like losing and finding yourself in the same breath.

“I believe in you too,” Riz murmurs, tracing circles on the skin of Fabian’s stomach, beneath his shirt. So easy to touch, after all, and to keep on touching. He believes in Fabian, not as a worshipper would a god, but just as a dumb teenage boy putting his dreams—and nightmares—in another dumb teenage boy’s hands, with the knowledge that there’s so much beyond both their control, but also the faith that they’ll grow together to become more than they are now. “Spring break!”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are much appreciated! I watched all of Fantasy High in the past two weeks and I am OVERCOME with FEELINGS. You can find me on tumblr at [reluming](http://reluming.tumblr.com). I would love to chat to more people about FH!


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